Sometimes, Microsoft Excel may close before you have had the chance to save all the changes you have made to a file that you are currently working on. There are many reasons for this ' there may have been a sudden power outage, another program that is running simultaneously may cause Excel to become unstable or there may be some problem with Microsoft Excel itself. Whatever the reason, in most of these situations the file ends up getting damaged to some extent and there is a fear that some, if not all the data may end up getting lost. While we will look at ways in which we can repair Excel files, we will first understand how the AutoRecover option works in Excel.

 

If you choose to use the AutoRecover option in Microsoft Excel, you can avoid losing all the important changes you have made in your file in the following manner.

§         When you enable AutoRecover, your Excel file is automatically saved at a frequency specified by you. Therefore, if you are going to be working on a long document or are going to be make extensive changes in a document, it is better that you enable the AutoRecover option to save your changes as frequently as possible. This way, even if you forget to save the file and the power goes out, you can be sure that most of the changes that you made would have been saved and you do not have to immediately try to repair Excel file.

§         Another advantage to enabling the AutoRecover option is that some aspects of the state of the Excel program are saved when the program closes unexpectedly. The next time you try to start the program, it may remember the state it was in when it closed abnormally and will restart from that point. For example, if the Excel file you were working on had a few worksheets open at the time it crashed, the next time you try to reopen it, it should start with the same set of worksheets and with the data in the way they were before Excel crashed.

 

While it is true that that AutoRecover feature may not help you restore all the changes you have made or the exact state of the program when it closed, it will certainly help you to recover most of your data fairly quickly.

 

Unfortunately, at times, this feature does not prove sufficient to prevent corruption in the files when Excel closes unexpectedly. In such cases, you might have to repair Excel files using a sophisticated repair tool such as Advanced Excel Repair. This tool scans damaged Excel files and recovers maximum data from them, ensuring that your data stays safe at all times.